Ok sorry, I have to pay attention to what I'm saying , I found what was interesting :

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Audiocritic

Anyone without actual hearing impairment
can hear what they hear, but
only those with training and experience
know what to make of it, how to
interpret it.
Thus, if a loudspeaker has a huge
dip at 3 kHz, it will not sound like
one with flat response to any ear,
golden or tin, but only the experienced
ear will quickly identify the
problem.

I'm going to read that article entirely, I've already seen it once actually .
And if I understand well, I'm going to keep listening to music and train train train !
I just have to find more rock for my collection, it's about 200 tracks only , I'm really picky... Muse, Radiohead are my favorite I like this kind of rock it's not the real rock'n'roll but at least it uses real instruments !!!
I would like to review audio material like dfkt so you can guess this is very embarassing...
It feels kind of stupid to test with mostly artificial electronic music doesn't it ? I guess every reviewer has it's very own tracks he loves but without real instruments you can't really tell if it sounds right... At least if I want to test something this kind of music allows me to quickly have an idea of the sound signature. There are some tracks I've listened to more than 2000 times (literally ).

By the way I've started a review in french for the IE8s, it's very late for it I know but it's only 250 euros now so it's a real bargain in France and it may very well be helpful. I've made 5 pages so far so it's pretty long, I tested several devices, took pictures etc...
Also, there is something that worries me a lot : THE SCREWS OF MY IE8 !! It changes very slightly now . I turned up the basses to the minimum and there were already much basses, then turned to the max just a bit more while when they were new I couldn't stand more than 10minutes with the basses at the maximum. I even tried puttin max on one ear min on the other, the difference is really not big anymore . I actually burned them in with the basses at the middle but the screws are supposed to fix the quantity of basses once and for all right ?????

OK, I downloaded the FLAC of "California Gurls" and converted it to LAME -v0 (no need for 320k CBR, I rather compare to what I actually use).

The mixing/mastering of that track is seriously bad. There's so much grain, harmonic distortion, and compression/ducking artifacts throughout the frequency range (but especially the drums), it seems as LAME at -v0 indeed struggles to reproduce that track properly. A small difference to the original FLAC can be heard especially in the bass decay, in an ABX test. The original FLAC bass has longer decay, sounds fuller and punchier, the MP3 sounds thinner and resonates less.

However, I couldn't stand to ABX that track for a long time, due to the horrible brickwall mastering and painfully piercing hi-hats and cymbals. My ears got seriously fatigued after less than 5 minutes.

Seems LAME's psychoacoustic masking is optimized for "better" mastered music - seems it has to cope with so many artifacts from that awful song, it has to remove audible parts to maintain its given bitrate constraints. This is the first time I actually could ABX a -v0 track positively, but then again, I don't really listen to that kind of mainstream-radio-MTV-mastered music...

It's happened before that with mp3, there are very rare occasions where it just breaks the FLAC (there's a list of such songs on hydrogenaudio... You could add this song to the list maybe?) I know it would be a pain, but would you be willing to subject yourself to a second track from the album to see if you can still tell the difference? That would make it a lot clearer that there is something about the mastering, rather than a weird glitch with the encoding process.

It's also possible that this type of mastering is exactly what does break mp3s, but then I'd expect the list to be gigantic, rather than just a collection of songs from various albums...

I've found that the type of music makes a difference. For most of my heavy metal high quality ogg makes it sound almost as good as lossless. However for tracks which are more open and have more of an airy feel, like acoustic songs or even some heavy metal songs, flac there is a noticeable difference